Russell on Red Bull rumours: "Not my duty to dive into those details"

Like teammate Lewis Hamilton, George Russell hopes that it will eventually turn out that Red Bull Racing has won the 2021 world title 'fair and square' with Max Verstappen. If not, in the GPDA president's view, it is necessary to punish the Austrian rival appropriately for the offence(s).

The FIA was actually supposed to bring out a report on Wednesday that would include all the findings after the investigation, but the governing body reported that it needs five more days to properly map everything out. Russell is curious about the outcome, but he cannot do more than wait and see. As such, it will not affect him over the weekend.

"It’s not my duty to dive into those details and I’ll just sit and wait and see what the results are on Monday," Russell is quoted by Marca at the press conference in Japan. "But I just know from our experience within Mercedes, how hard the whole team have worked to stay within that cost cap - we know we can bring more performance to the table if we had more money to spend, and it’s as simple as that."

Confidence in FIA

The Mercedes driver says he trusts the judgement of chairman Mohammed Ben Sulayem and the FIA. Russell himself would think it logical that the amount teams overspent should be deducted from the maximum budget that can be spent next year. On top of that, there should be a penalty so that it remains a one-off offence.